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Sunday I was driving home from Denton and I died. I was eating my favorite on-the-road snack, chicken fried steak covered in gravy, when I drove my car off a bridge into Lake Dallas. For a moment I’m dazed by the sheer impact. I’m pretty upset. There’s steak and gravy all over my steering wheel.

“Damn it,” I say. “I paid eight bucks for that.” I look around my car and suddenly noticed it filling up with water. “Water…? Did my car’s water break? Car?” I say, “Are you having a baby? Are you having a baby car?” It in fact wasn’t. I was in my aquatic, automotive, death chamber. I try to roll the windows down, but the mechanism has shorted out and they sit motionless. “God almighty,” I say. “I need to get that fixed.”

I run through my next set of of escape plans. I don’t really want to break my windows (They’re tinted, and that’s kind of expensive.), but I decide that I have a lot more sandwiches to eat and that dying would severely inhibit that. I grab a tire iron and smash the driver side window. I crawl out of the car as it sinks into the lake. I feel the cold water rush against my legs as I pull myself out of the cabin, clawing at the roof. When the tail lights broke the surface of the water the pressure pulled me down roughly ten feet before I’m able to fight my way back to air.

As I swim to the beach, I notice a group of children playing in the sand. Up to this point, I’ve had a pretty depressing day, so I decided to have some fun. I go down under the water and swim toward the beach. I slowly raise up out of the water, covered in seaweed and mud, making guttural groans and pointing at the children.

“RAAAAH!” I yell. The children run away screaming. It’s here that I notice a large piece of my driver side window lodged in my inner thigh, a warm rivulet of blood running from the wound to the back of my knee and to the sand, forming a puddle around my feet.”Wait. Is that my blood?” I ask a child who is trying to take a picture of me with his cell phone. “That is my blood, isn’t it?” He only nods and I hear a sharp *Click* sound from his phone. Then, I black out.

I wake up in what appears to be a big waiting room. It smells like cinnamon and lumber. I love those smells. In fact, they’re my favorites. They are my favorite smells. I reach into my pocket to tweet about my favorite smells, but I don’t have my phone. I start to freak out for a bit, patting down all my other pockets and eying everyone surrounding me with suspicion. I decide to go out to my car to see if I had left it in there. I stand up, still looking around the room for any sign of guilt or extreme happiness from the acquisition of a new/stolen phone. Nothing.

I walk to the door, or rather, where I figured a door would be, but there isn’t one. There’s no visible exit out of this building. There’s only a door at the northwest corner of the room, leading you further into the office. There’s a clerk’s window as well. I go up to ask her a question when I hear my name called from the door.

“Mr. Irion? He’s ready for you.” It was a petite African-American woman in a nurse’s uniform.

I follow her down a long hallway. The walls are painted teal and the floor is carpeted in industrial-brown. We walk for a long time, then it’s as if the walls fade away and we’re surrounded by stars. Our footsteps leave brilliant patches of white light behind us. I try to write “Kyle 4-ever” with my foot, but the nurse reaches back and gently pulls me away. At some point, the walls return and we stand in front of a large Oak door.

“That’s a really nice door.” I say.

“Yes sir.” She says and walks away.

The door opens and I walk in. There’s a man in a white coat leaning on a counter in front of an examination table. He has a very well-groomed mustache. What a show off.

He gestures for me to sit down and I do.

“Kyle. It’s good to see you. I’m sorry to be seeing you so early, though.”

“Wait, what do you mean? Is this morning? Damn it. Who tricked me into waking up early? I don’t ‘do’ mornings.”

“No, Kyle. You’re dead.”

I spit out a drink that I hadn’t realized I was drinking. “What? I’m right here. What do you mean I’m d–”

“You’re dead. You bled out on that beach. I’m sorry.”

“Oh. Is this heaven?”

“Not quite. What I’m going to do is take a diagnostic of your life and decide if it’s healthy enough to go to heaven. So why don’t we get started, eh?”

“OK.”

“Let’s look at your best moments first.” He presses his stethoscope to my heart, and a screen to my right becomes illuminated. Images begin to flash on the screen. The first thing that appears is me as a child, no older than three or four.

“Stud.” I say.

In the image, I’m babbling on about something, sitting with my brother, when a spider begins to approach us. I reach out with my toy and smash it. I then pick a booger and fall over.

“Th…that’s one of my best moments?”

“That spider was highly venomous, Kyle. It would have killed your brother had you not smashed it.”

“Yes, well. I do what I can.” I sit and imagine how much better Christmas would have been if my parents only had to buy presents for two people instead of three. This thought later appears during my worst moments segment.

The Doctor only looks at me and shakes his head.

“We have a lot more to get to. We should probably continue with the tests,” he says. I agree and sit quietly as he searches with his stethoscope.